Taxonomy term

multimedia

Titles can sometimes be a hard thing to live up to, but “Big Picture Science,” a weekly radio program broadcast on about 100 stations nationwide, delivers on its name. The show, which cleverly covers everything from a study of frogs in pants to efforts to create a compassionate computer, lives up to its mission of presenting a wide-angle view of science and technology.

With hurricane season officially getting under way on May 15 in the Eastern Pacific and June 1 in the Atlantic, NOAA has been busy this week publicizing National Hurricane Preparedness Week, which aims to inform the public about what they can do to prepare for potentially damaging and life-threatening storms. This year, the agency is simultaneously hosting its annual Hurricane Awareness Tour, a week-long traveling exhibition starring hurricane hunting aircraft and their crews. EARTH's Tim Oleson dropped by the tour stop in Washington, D.C., on May 9 to check it out and talk with Rick Knabb, director of the National Hurricane Center.

For decades, structural engineers have listened to the tiny vibrations of buildings and bridges to detect internal damage or weakness. In recent years, geoscientists have begun employing this technique, called “structural health monitoring,” to discover the hidden inner workings of natural rock features. In a new study, researchers have applied this method for the first time to examine a rock arch — Utah’s famous Mesa Arch — to determine whether this delicate structure is stable or soon to collapse.

Across the Internet, science shows abound, such as “Crash Course,” “The Brain Scoop” and “Vsauce.” A good educational video is like watching a professional ballerina — if the dance is done well, it looks effortless. Of course, neither ballet nor film is actually easy, especially when the medium is meant to carry a message. A new class at MIT is helping students break down the steps and twirls of video and having them choreograph their own short educational films — with the goal of teaching them to better communicate, and deepen their own sense of the science, by explaining complex ideas like the Big Bang, the architecture of the Wheatstone Bridge or the chemistry of bread.

If you’ve ever wanted to take a dive into the ocean depths and explore the seafloor below the waves, but just haven’t had the time (or financing) to build your own deep-sea submersible, here’s another solution. NOAA’s 68-meter Okeanos Explorer — the only federally funded ship dedicated to “solely to exploration” — is currently trolling the Atlantic Ocean on the three-week third leg of a mission dubbed “Our Deepwater Backyard: Exploring Atlantic Canyons and Seamounts 2014,” and it’s offering to take guests along for part of the ride.

Butte, Mont., is home to one of the nation’s largest Superfund sites — a 300-meter-deep lake of acidic, heavy metal-contaminated water known as the Berkeley Pit. As the reclamation manager of Butte-Silver Bow County, it’s Tom Malloy’s job to help clean it up.

The Green Ninja may sound like a spin-off of the “Power Rangers,” the live-action children’s television series featuring color-coded superheroes. But there’s a little less punch and a lot more thought going into this YouTube science show for kids.

The deadly landslide that struck near Oso, Wash., in March killed more than 40 people and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage, most of which was not covered by insurance. The landslide was not a surprise to geologists. Could this disaster have been prevented — or can future disasters be prevented?

The main purpose of the world’s largest neutrino observatory — the $270-million IceCube project — is to detect and hopefully identify the as-yet-only-theorized sources of exceptionally high-energy subatomic neutrinos that stream through space. In a new study, the members of the project, comprising about 250 scientists, laid out their case showing that the first of those goals — detection — has been accomplished. They detailed 28 detection events of neutrinos ranging in energy from about 30 tera-electronvolts (TeV) to 1.14 peta-electronvolts (PeV) — far higher than for any neutrinos previously observed — and suspected of having originated outside the solar system in violent phenomena like quasars and gamma ray bursts.